props to you for still doing these pie. It was cool when I was doing these when they first started up, and even though we could get coaches back then I remember when Shwan and i would organize we would have a hard time getting them. It pretty much came down to having a lot of people on our friendslist and spamming everyone we could trust to coach to come out and do so. We had to try to strike a balance between having good coaches and enough coaches, it was hard. I dont really have any insight into how u can get more coaches except trying to get people with a lot of pull and sway in the community to start helping out and help will follow them. Good luck!

from a coaching perspective, it can get a bit repetitive as you end up teaching the same concepts over and over.
i think that's why many coaches start out enthusiastically and then sort of drop off.

on the bright side, you do get to meet new people as a coach.

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I'd be up for doing this, but I don't really know how it works. Could you run me down how I would get involved, how often, when they normally happen etc?

It's like mile said, best way to get people isn't a group or anything, just message people on your friends list that you trust to be a good coach. They'll be less likely to dick around because you personally asked them.

Well they start at 9 EST every Friday night, so that's probably going to be really late (2 GMT?) for most Europeans, although a few have done this before.

Newbie Mixes are always in the 6 vs 6 format, with 1 coach per team. These coaches generally have about 2 seasons of ESEA experience, but we accept coaches with just 1 season of experience. We limit coaches to only being able to play Pocket or Medic and we have also decided to let them coach from spectator, allowing for a full team of 6 Newbies to be able to play, we generally do this during our "high tide" of players. Coaches are there for basically everything, from showing people rollouts on the various maps to answering questions about gameplay, the coach is there to share their knowledge with the Newbies who have a lot less experience then said coach.

Now, I don't know how well you would like staying up late and helping the NA Newbie Mixes, but if you wanted to start your own EU Newbie Mixes, I'm sure a few of the admins of the current Newbie Mixes, myself included, would be glad to help with whatever you needed to get started.

If there are anymore questions you have or something I didn't cover add me and we can talk on steam!

To your point about the group size, you should be wary of the number of total group members. I would assume many members are former newbies who are no longer fit to play in newbie mixes but also aren't able/willing to coach, and have simply neglected to remove the group from their list.

Honestly man (and this doesn't really apply to pugs specifically but it's still valid), the one thing this community can do to get new players involved is just not be toxic towards them. The people who actually want to grow Tf2 and get new people playing comp seem like a minority vs the players who talk crap because they have more experience.

You should make something equivalent for europe in my opinion.

I'm not sure what exactly what y'all are doing in terms of segregating newbies by skill - but it seems like there's still a lot of mixing true newbies with folks with a lot of UGC/pug/low-Open experience - I understand why but it probably is a little frustrating for a lot of coaches when a lot of players have really, really different needs for learning.

Some newbies don't know the names of locations or the utter basics of rollouts and advantages while others have the basics down but need to improve their gamesense or other aspects of the meta.

It might be good to segregate more stringently and have coaches take full groups of similar levels so everyone is equally engaged and make the coaching itself more rewarding - basically have coaches take all newbies or all advanced players.

Lots of times I played the coach wouldn't have much for half the team because they were so busy working on the utter basics with a player or two that they couldn't really offer much to the intermediate or advanced newbies.

Yeah. We've tried to get this off the ground in AU but it kind of fizzles out because there's not really anyone with both the time and motivation to run such a thing.

I've just started doing it in Brazil. Every friday I call someone from my friendlist to be the second coach and we play 2 maps with the newbies. It doens't take too much time and the newbies have been pretty interested in everything we have to say.

The coolest thing about this is that we can teach the newbies about some game mechanics like critheal that some people that think MGE is the most important thing in the game don't seem to understand.

If EU newbie mixes were a thing I think it would reduce the amount of people going to NA newbie mixes and more to EU mixes simply because EU's go to the NA newbie mixes. For example I started out with Newbie mixes and played them for about 2 months.
Pretty sure plenty of EU players would be glad to hold some EU newbie mixes.
Think its a good idea IMO

props to people who run those
il try to swing by more often to help

Whats required of a coach. I'd like to help but i've got the gamesense of a potato. Also, I tend to have a short fuse for people who are disruptive/annoying so I don't know how well I would mesh with newer players.

I can really only think of a handful of euros who have shown up to these and most of them were there to troll rather than learn about the game.

nice to see you guys made this an option, i coached when these first started and the spec pov was much more helpful

That's 3 CET in case anyone is wondering

They only ask for a season of Open experience so you'd be fine. From what I';ve seen most of the people are all there to learn, so aside from people being a little slow to pick up on things you might consider basic people aren't really trying to be disruptive.

I think that any player with above UGC-steel experience (silver+) shouldn't be a newbie because at their level, just playing in general is all that is needed. It should be for players with little to no experience, not advanced exp.

You should definitely come try it out once, some players try it and find out that they don't have the correct mentality to do it and others find out their pretty good at it. All these Newbies need are the basic ideas of competitive, callouts, rollouts, when to push and where to hold are the bare necessities a coach needs to know to be able to help their team learn.

Honestly, some people are there to mess around and ruin everyone's experience, but when the admins are alerted to this we generally remove said player and get a replacement pretty fast.

I would generally agree, but what we've done as a solution to this is to have the more experienced coaches play with more experienced players, when we can afford to do that. We almost always prioritize those who add up in the lower skill level which means those added to higher skill levels play less.

I didn't realize these were still going on. I'll try to stop by this Friday and help out as well as in the future

that's debatable...i think anyone that is UGC no matter what division is qualified for newbie mixes, they have a lot to learn if they haven't even touched ESEA yet

I didn't see an event post this week and was curious. Helps to get that posted every week, even if it is weekly - just so people remember.

As someone who has played in UGC the past couple seasons, the divisions tend to not separate skill very well. Whether it be a team sandbagging or a team that the UGC admins refuse to move up even though they have proven themselves in their current division. The skill level jump from teams I have played in Silver to teams that I have had to scrim against that are in Open is usually pretty large though.

when we were running newbie mixes in the past the people that were playing in them had either lobby or no 6v6 experience. The types of people we would literally have to explain every classes role in the game, how the demoman gets to mid, who the medic should heal, etc. Basically these people were straight off Reddit. Mixing those types of people with people who even have a season of UGC doesn't seem like a good idea to me, and tbh misses the potential of what the newbie mixes could achieve. While UGC players no doubt could use a little coaching, getting brand new players into 6s is definitely the priority over improving the skill of players already somewhat into it.

yeah that makes sense to prioritize the players with little to zero experience over some ugc heads, how do you guys organize it so well when you're showing a full house? when i coached there was roughly 20-40 people in mumble so it wasn't so bad but when you're talking 100 people how do you know which ones actually have zero league experience do you just separate everyone into channels and ask them to be honest about it? its been a while since i've done it and i'm sure you guys had to change things up quite a bit since the group has grown so much

huh

the reason i stopped coaching was that i was disproportionately traumatised after one of my newbies ignored me and countercalled

maybe i'll try it out again :>

i coached for newbie mixes last friday, it was a ton of fun and all the players were very receptive to the advice i offered them, if you know a lot about the game i totally recommend heading down there to help some people out, i know ill be doing it as much as possible :D